Edgar Allan Poe and Elias Canetti: Illuminating the Sources of Terror

In The Torch in My Ear, the second volume of his four-volume autobiography, Elias Canetti recounts an episode from his university days in which he passed an uneasy morning in chemistry laboratory with a fellow student, Eva Reichmann: "I talked about a book I had started reading the day before: Poe's tales. She didn't know them, and I told her about one, 'The Telltale Heart,' which had really terrified me. . . . I tried to free myself of this terror by repeating the story to her" (191). In seeking to dispel the terror generated by reading Poe's tale, Canetti turns to another human being and attempts to relieve his uneasiness by communicating his frightening experience to her as they seek to analyze his fears. In its approach of uncovering and dispelling the sources of terror in human relations, the episode points toward the long and distinguished career that Canetti would enjoy, not as a chemist but as novelist, playwright, literary critic, autobiographer, and, most importantly, as author of Crowds and Power, the most authoritative and original of modern treatises on crowd psychology.¹

It is hardly coincidental that Canetti should have been struck so forcefully by the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, for there is a remarkable sense in Poe's tales of a writer who anticipated many of Canetti's insights. The fact that literature is, among other things, the record of instinctual crowd behavior was apparent to Canetti at a very early point in his life, and the affinity that Canetti perceived between his and Poe's interests is connected with a life-long effort to explain and to ameliorate the destructive potential of mass behavior. In Canetti's mind, the Holocaust was the culmination of a long history of unfaced and unresolved fear. This history, characterized by increasingly tyrannical forms of control, involved precisely those psychological terrors that Poe focused on: the sense that the world was increasingly dominated by accidental forces beyond comprehension and, in response, the rise of increasingly authoritarian conceptions of history and social order. As a result, the central focus for both writers was nothing less than the fear of annihilation.

Elias Canetti's classic work, Crowds and Power, is a detailed analysis of the patterns of crowd behavior and of the ways in which individuals relate psychologically to crowds. Canetti begins his analysis with a classification of different crowd types under such headings as crowd flight, prohibition, and doubling. A second major section of the work analyzes the existence of the pack, a smaller and more primitive unit that anticipated the development of the crowd in civilization. Canetti then turns to the effects of the crowd in human history, with particular emphasis on the violence of the Holocaust. He studies the primitive human instincts that anticipate modern power, and he traces the rise of what he terms the "survivor," the paranoiac leader obsessed with absolute command of others. Canetti follows this analysis of the survivor with a more detailed examination of the workings of power, carefully analyzing the ways in which commands are issued and received. He also studies transformation of crowd types and psychological identification with these types. Canetti, finally, concludes with a dissection of power and an analysis of the tendency toward paranoia in rulers.

In Canetti's sympathetic reading of Poe, he intuitively focuses on the terrifying elements of fear and isolation that Poe projects. Poe's writing evinces a profound psychological intuition concerning the instinct for power underlying social relationships, particularly those relationships involving postures of dominance or victimization. In one of Poe's most popular tales, "The Gold-Bug," the protagonist is an isolated gentleman who, like many of Poe's main characters, dreams of restoring himself to wealth and social prominence. A crucial element of "The Gold-Bug," of course, is the motif of hidden treasure, a psychological fixation with which Canetti deals at considerable length. The idea of hidden treasure contains a peculiar tension between "the splendour it should radiate and the secrecy which is its protection" (Crowds 89).Inherent in the concept...